Fierce Aria by Maxima Kahn

Description

Fierce Aria

by Maxima Kahn

$19.99, Full-length, paper

978-1-64662-194-1

2020

Fierce Aria is about the difficulty and beauty of being a human being in these times and the role art-making plays in that.

I find it to be a fierce task to be a human being alive in a body, particularly as an artist and deeply-feeling person with an active spiritual life. To grapple with the horrors that humanity inflicts on one another and the planet juxtaposed against the awe-inspiring beauty and wonder of nature but also its inherent violence, I find extremely challenging.

There is this lyric beauty in nature, in our souls, in our hearts, in art, in the Mystery, that sustains me, inspires me and that I seek to bring forth in my work.

And there are profoundly troubling questions that I have to keep asking. To wrestle with philosophical questions about why things are the way they are and how we can live well amidst the paradoxes is a life-long artistic quest for me.

I want to be truthful to my lived experience, and I hope by doing that, it will touch and awaken things in others. Yet, when someone at a reading once asked me why should we write poetry, I responded, “To tell the truth, but in a beautiful way, so that we can bear it.” Beauty and truth must duke it out together in order for a depth and richness to come forth.

These two, the fierceness and the lyric beauty wrestle with one another in this book. I wanted to hold them up to the light to give people courage, inspiration, hope, a sense of not being so alone. I wanted to make a thing of beauty and truth, to make the invisible visible, to give voice to the unsayable and to speak eloquently for those who struggle to find the words for their feelings and experiences. I want to wake people up to greater aliveness. I believe poems can do this in an extraordinary way, casting a magical spell with words that awakens feelings, memories, imagination, sensations and calling us to greater being.

I have always found the invisible and imaginal worlds—the worlds of emotions, spirits and imagination—to be vividly alive for me, even more than the apparent physical world. So, I have had a driving need to capture that ineffable wonder and strangeness on the page in some way, while also honoring the physical world and experiences. These things aren’t, in fact, separate.

And these paradoxes are what Fierce Aria is all about.

–Maxima Kahn

Maxima Kahn is a writer of poetry, essays and fiction. Her work has been featured in numerous literary journals and blogs and she has twice been nominated for Best of the Net. She has taught creative writing and creative process privately since 2004 and formerly at the University of California, Davis Extension. She is also an improvisational violinist, an award-winning composer and a dancer.